There is absolute precision of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a robber, it's likely their subject will have modeled himself on their performances in old movies. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. McCauley is now on a roof looking at them through a lens, having smoked out his tail.ĭe Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great films in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves than most cops and thieves have. Suddenly Hanna gets it: "You know what they're looking at? They're looking at us - the LAPD. Later, the cops stand in the same place, trying to figure out what plan the thieves could possibly have had in mind. The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow them to an isolated warehouse area, where the thieves stand in the middle of a vast space and McCauley outlines some plan to them. Hanna is the guy assigned to guess his next move. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks.
It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "I am not lonely." He is in fact the loneliest man in the world, and soon finds that he needs her. "Lady," he says to her, "why are you so interested in what I do?" She is lonely.
One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady ( Amy Brenneman), who asks him a lot of questions. McCauley's own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can't shed in 30 seconds flat. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice ( Diane Venora), who is bitter because his job obsesses him: "You live among the remains of dead people." One of McCauley's crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis ( Val Kilmer), whose wife is Charlene ( Ashley Judd). Two of the key players in "Heat" have wives, and in the course of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends - their women, for example.
The cop says, "I don't know how to do anything else." The thief says, "Neither do I." The scene concentrates the truth of "Heat," which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules. When Hanna subtly suggests otherwise, he says, "You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a 'Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" No, says the cop, he doesn't.
McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted.
The two men sit across from each other at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one other, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee.